The number ten thousand, to me, is a number that is “just
about right,” a big enough number to be counted as a “big number.” If you were going
on a TV game show, a jackpot of nine thousand pounds sounds like a big enough
number, but TEN thousand... We do many things thousands of times in our lives,
but if you can look someone in the face at the end of the day, and say you walked
TEN THOUSAND STEPS that day, it sounds like an achievement.

Likewise, if you can play the saxophone like Clarence
Clemons or David Sanborn, it is because you spent as many as ten thousand hours
practising: breaking that time down into a nine-to-five, five-day work week,
minus an hour per day for lunch and breaks, and six weeks’ holiday a year, ten
thousand hours becomes SIX YEARS, and a couple of months – if I start now, I
may be up to the E Street Band’s standard once I hit forty years old, provided
Bruce Springsteen doesn’t retire by then.

Ten thousand sounds an easy number to pick, but these two
uses of it have reasoning behind them: ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics,
a Japanese company made a pedometer named “manpo-kei” – “10,000-step meter”-
which they later backed up with research that advised walking this number each
day helps maintain a healthy weight. This target has since been taken up by the
World Health Organisation, and the NHS considers a walker of seven to ten
thousand steps per day to be “moderately active”, having walked twice the
national average to get into that range.

However, practising for ten thousand hours is more difficult
to prove, and even harder to justify. The figure was popularised by Malcolm
Gladwell, in his 2008 book “Outliers,” which looked at why some people are able
to achieve more than others. However, people took his writing to mean this
number is a cut-off point, where you become an “expert” upon reaching it. The
original 1993 research paper, snappily titled, ”The Role of Deliberate Practice
in the Acquisition of ExpertPerformance,”
talked of this figure being an average – some people just get the hang of
things more quickly than others. Its writer, the professor Anders Ericsson, later
contended that Gladwell didn’t mention the practice had to be “deliberate” –
the name of that essay, “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists,” makes
it sound like the rigour needed to do a proper job is something you cannot
teach, even if you could try to learn.

What should I do? Practice makes perfect, but practice means
pushing yourself – keep walking that bit further than the last time, and learn
your major and minor scales on your saxophone. Ten thousand is a target, but
once you reach it, set a new one.